of shelf—the diary, I assume, and says it has been there the
01
whole time, where my sister left it.
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I shake my head, and bite my lip, to suppress the urge to
03
yell out,
No, no, that is not where she left it. It was on the floor.
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In Peter’s room. It fell from her hands as they carried her out.
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She never kept it on a bookshelf! She hid it away, in her mat-
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tress, just like I did with mine.
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But then I see her—Millie Perkins—and I forget about
08
the book for the moment. She bounces into a room, into the
09
annex. The place is familiar, but the people, they are all
10
wrong. Millie, she is nearly laughable. She is a woman, not a
11
girl. She is a model, slim and graceful and filled with infalli
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ble beauty. She is way too old to be my sister, way too pol
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ished. But wait, where is Margot? Oh, there I am, somewhere
14
off in the background, like a second-class citizen. At least I
15
am attractive, more so than in real life.
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I chew my popcorn, throwing it in handfuls in my mouth.
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It tastes so good, buttery and salty and warm. I eat, and I
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watch the screen as if in a trance. My eyes cannot let go of
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these people and their story. I do not know them. This story,
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it is filled with so much danger and romance and hope. Why
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is there so much ridiculous hope?
22
You’re all going to die,
I want to shout at the screen,
all
23
of you.
24
You will be stripped and shaven and broken and tattooed.
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Fleas will dance off your body like sparks, and the air will
26
become a film that suffocates you until you can no longer
27
breathe. Stop smiling, Millie. Honestly. The annex is not that
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01
beautiful. The world is not that beautiful. My sister, she
02
understood that.
03
And then there is Peter. Oh, Peter. He is not at all as
04
handsome as I remember him being in real life. He is the one
05
to which the silver screen does no justice. The movie is in
06
black and white, and so there are no eyes blue enough to be
07
the sea. He is strangely goofy, making eyes at Millie Perkins
08
like a dummy as she chases after Mouschi.
09
When I see them together, I laugh a little, and I dig into
10
the popcorn. My hand scrapes the bottom of the cardboard
11
carton. I chew louder, and I need a napkin, but I am not about
12
to stand up to walk back to the concession stand to get one.
13
Margot is quiet. So quiet. She barely says a word the entire
14
time, as if she spent two years of her life a mute in the back
15
ground, not at all the kind of girl who would kiss Peter, in his
16
room, in the darkness. No, in the movie she is the kind of girl
17
who, one night, after she has been ill, blurts out at the dinner
18
table that she wishes everything would end already. I hear
19
these words come out of her mouth, and I start laughing. I am
20
laughing and laughing so hard, that then I am crying. The
21
screen is blurry; it is hard to see, to focus. The strangers on
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the screen swim in front of my eyes.
23
Then Millie and Peter stand in front of the window, where
24
the sky tumbles, large and beautiful. They hold on to each
25
other, just the way the book said they did. There are sirens so
26
loud and so obvious—movie sirens—from the street below.
27
Then the screech of brakes, and Millie and Peter, they cling
28S
to each other so hard, so fast, their lips meeting. And Margot,
29N
she is nowhere to be found.
I close my eyes, and then I am holding on to him on the
01
divan.
02
Peter?
My sister stands there, saying his name.
03
There were no sirens. Just quiet one moment, my sister’s
04
voice, then banging on the annex door.
05
On the big screen, the music swirls. The lovers embrace
06
and are still kissing with deep movie-star passion, just as
07
Shelby said.
08
I stand up quickly, forgetting about the popcorn, and the
09
carton tumbles, spilling kernels to the sticky floor.
10
I know what happens next. And I cannot watch anymore.
11
I run through the front of the theater, and I hit the street,
12
where the sunlight is too bright and burns my eyes. I squint
13
as I run back toward Ludlow Street, the stupid poem we
14
wrote for Pim playing itself in my head. Only suddenly I can
15
not remember the order of it at all.
16
Pim, Pim, you are so dim. You like to do things on a whim.
17
Your hair is gray; your world is grim. You are dead to me now,
18
my dear sweet Pim.
19
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C
hapt
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Fo
rt
y-three
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Pim and I, we never fought the way my sister and my
15
mother did. We never yelled or screamed harsh words at each
16
other. I did not write angry things about him in my diary the
17
way my sister did about my mother.
18
It was just that we all knew, all of us. My sister belonged
19
to our father, and I belonged to my mother. We were split that
20
way, two and two, and we always had been. Sometimes I won
21
dered if it was by default, if Father would’ve paid more atten
22
tion to me if given the chance. Was Mother only mine
23
because she and my sister could not get along? But now, after
24
ward, I have come to understand that could not have been it
25
entirely.
26
Peter did not love his parents, not the way I loved mine.
27
Sometimes he fought with them, but not like Joshua and Ezra
28S
do, or even like my mother and my sister did, when fire
29N
exploded between them, sparks of love and hate and passion
01
falling into one. Mostly, they ignored each other. And Peter
02
seethed, quietly.
03
“What about our parents?” I asked Peter once, in his room
04
in the annex, in the middle of the night. “What will happen
05
to them when we go to America.” I thought about Mother and
06
Pim, about the way she had begun to cling to him in the
07
annex, holding on to his arm with her thin fingers in a way
08
she had never done on the Merwedeplein.
09
We were together all the time, every second, every day.
10
For two years. I didn’t even have the capacity to imagine it
11
then, this person I have now become without them. But Peter
12
simply shrugged, as if he could imagine life without them. I
13
remembered his story about bringing Mouschi into the annex,
14
how he felt his parents didn’t care about him. “They gave you
15
life,” I reminded him.
16
He frowned at me, and reached across the bed for his cat.
17
“Not everyone is a good parent like yours.” He paused. “Not
18
every father is smart and kind the way yours is, Margot.” He
19
stroked Mouschi’s fur roughly with his fingertips. “You know
20
why I never talked to you at school, really?” he asked.
21
“Why?” I murmured. But I was thinking that the lyceum
22
felt so far away, like something in a dream. School. Books.
23
Teachers. Walking through the halls with shoes and a light
24
step, and an easy sense of contentment. Had I ever really
25
done those things? Had I ever existed in a life, really and truly
26
of my own, outside the confines of this annex on the Prinsen
27
gracht?
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“You had so much,” he was saying. “And you took it all for
02
granted. You thought everyone had what you did.”
03
“And you could tell that, without ever having talked to
04
me?” I could not keep the annoyance from my voice.
05
“Yes,” he said. “You did well in school. Everybody loved
06
you there. All the teachers. Your home on the Merwedeplein
07
was so large and nice. And your father always lit up when he
08
talked about you and your sister.”
09
“How do you know all this?” I asked him. I had no idea
10
where Peter lived before the annex, or how his father had
11
talked about him. I’d seen him before at school. I’d noticed
12
him and his blue, blue eyes. But we’d never spoken. I’d never
13
thought much about him before the annex.
14
“I just do,” he said. “You and your sister, you never under
15
stood how lucky you are.”
16
“You don’t know everything,” I told him, standing up. It was
17
the middle of the night, and the moonlight cast an eerie slant
18
on Mouschi’s face, lighting his eyes yellow until they were
19
glowing. I felt as if my own face was glowing hot, under Peter’s
20
words, the idea that somehow I was spoiled, like my sister.
21
That I did not appreciate the things I had, or that I just assumed
22
that everyone’s parents loved them the way Pim and Mother
23
loved us.
24
“Come on. Sit back down,” Peter whispered.
25
“I don’t think so,” I huffed. “I think I’ll go back to my room
26
tonight.”
27
“Margot,” he called after me, gently. But I was already
28S
tiptoeing out, down the stairs, to my cot in my parents’ room,
29N
where Pim’s gentle snore rattled in his chest and Mother
01
gasped quietly in her sleep.
02
I lay on the cot for a long while, with my eyes open, won
03
dering if Peter was right, if I never understood it, everything
04
I had. Everything I would eventually lose.
05
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y-four
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13
14
In the two and half weeks since Ezra’s collapse,
15
Joshua has been to the office only twice. I have been in every
16
day, since Joshua called me at home the morning after and
17
asked me to please come in to work, at least until he knew
18
where things stood with his father. And so I understood, I
19
had not quit my job at all, but only ridden down in an elevator
20
then back up. Still, for some reason I have felt different sitting
21
at my desk. But maybe that is just because Joshua’s office has
22
remained mostly empty, only darkness clouding his glass
23
window.
24
Each morning when he has not come in, Joshua has
25
been phoning in, presumably from the hospital, with instruc
26
tions. And Shelby and I have been rescheduling appoint
27
ments, pushing back courthouse meetings, and, at Joshua’s
28S
request, handing Ezra’s most pressing cases over to other law
29N
yers in the firm.
His voice on the phone is solid and cool, all business,
01
nothing else. And the two times I have seen him, when he
02
has come in, Joshua has not looked at me, in the eyes, not
03
even for a second. He has walked off the elevator, in casual
04
brown spring pants and a short-sleeved plaid button-down
05
shirt. He is a different man without the suit and the tie.
06
Younger and larger all at once. He seems to take up more
07
space somehow, now that his father is not around. His voice
08
booms a little louder. And he has run into his office, past my
09
desk, without so much as a look.
10
Without Joshua in the office, I find myself daydreaming at
11
my desk and thinking again about Mrs. Pelt and Eleanor.
12
What if I was wrong? I wonder. What if she was not Mrs. Pelt
13
at all, but just a friend with a pink Cadillac who liked to visit?
14
She hadn’t told me her name. But she had implied that she’d
15
chosen the house somehow. Maybe she owns it and Peter
16
rents it from her? Maybe she is just the landlady? But no mat
17
ter how many what-ifs fall in my brain, none of them feel true
18
or right, and yet even though Joshua is not here, I cannot
19
bring myself to leave early, to go back there again. Every time
20
I think of it, I am stopped by that image from the movie, the
21
two of them kissing by the window as sirens blare in the
22
background. It is a fake image, but still, when I reimagine it,
23
over and over again in my head, my mind does not picture
24
their movie faces, but their real ones.
25
“Margie,” Shelby whispers across the desk one afternoon,
26
interrupting my thoughts. I look up, and she is pulling her
27
pack of Kents from her satchel. She holds them toward me. I
S28
shake my head. In Ezra’s absence, now, all the girls have
N29
01
begun taking their smokes at their desks. I wonder if it is the
02
changing times, the brink of a new decade, as Shelby says, or
03
if it is just that Joshua was not the only one in the office who
04
was afraid of Ezra’s wrath. The air feels more still in here,
05
calmer somehow, without Ezra, even though it is now tinged
06
with a steady haze of smoke.
07
Now Shelby lights her smoke and then smiles at me.
08
“We’ve set a date for the wedding,” she says.
09
“Oh?” I say, because in the midst of everything else, I have
10
nearly forgotten about Shelby’s wedding, about the pink
11
bridesmaids’ dresses she and Peg found.
12
“Saturday November twenty-first,” she tells me, inhaling
13
her smoke, then exhaling.
14
November. It will be cold, and thus we will most probably
15
wear long-sleeved dresses. But Saturday, my day of rest. I
16
hope it will be after sunset. Before I have a chance to ask her
17
anything, she divulges all the details: the Rittenhouse. At 7 p.
18
m. “It’s a little ritzy, but Ron wants only the best for me, and
19
so does my father—”
20
“Shelby,” I say, interrupting her, and she taps her smoke in
21
the empty coffee cup and looks up. “Are you sure?”
22
“Am I sure?” She laughs. “Wouldn’t you want a wedding at
23
the Rittenhouse, Margie?”
24
“I would want a marriage,” I tell her.
25
“A marriage?”
26
“A partnership with someone who loves me and respects
27
me.”
We will go to America, Peter said. We will be married. We
28S
will no longer be Jews. We will change our names. Become the
29N